Deadly Premonition: Director's Cut Preview

Hidetaka Suehiro – or SWERY, as he prefers to be known – has had the chance to do what very few game creators get to do: go back to his game after the critics have had their way with it, and make it better. Not THAT much better, admittedly, but then making Deadly Premonition too much better would rather undermine its shonky charm.

The original Deadly Premonition was at once one of the best and worst games I’d ever played back in 2010, an entrancingly bizarre suburban horror-adventure at turns undermined and enhanced by comically dreadful driving and shooting, extraordinarily weird characters and a story that’s totally compelling despite the fact that it makes almost no sense whatsoever. It’s often said that it’s the video game version of Twin Peaks, and it certainly has that destabilising, post-structuralist Lynchian thing going on. I still can’t quite decide whether it’s intentional.

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It’s the game’s main character, Francis York Morgan, who holds the whole thing together. He is intriguing, well-written, a touch schizophrenic, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of 80s movies and a possibly-imaginary friend called Zach who follows him around the strange suburban Greenvale in his head. He seems totally unfazed by all the oddness that happens around him, which only accentuates how odd it all is.

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Driving feels less like propelling a giant brick across an ice rink.

The Director’s Cut of Deadly Premonition is coming to PS3 in the US and Europe in April, and it has bashed through a few of this fascinatingly divisive game’s barriers to entry. There’s a lock-on now in combat, and the shooting controls – which previously mimicked the controller-wrestling native to the early PlayStation era of survival horror – are smoother. Driving, too, feels less like propelling a giant brick across an ice rink, though the mosquito-whine of the car’s engine still raises a smile.

Visually it’s also been improved – part of Deadly Premonition’s weirdness stems from the fact that it had been in development for so long that many of the game’s assets and textures were PS2-era, which made the game look totally anachronistic in 2010. It’s still got that strange look about it, but it’s just a little less janky than it was before.

“The original version had… some space for improvement,” says SWERY, diplomatically. “Some of that improvement has been done with the Director’s Cut – that includes the graphics side, and also the controls were too difficult, so that improvement has been made as well. We made improvements according to reviews for the original version, and according to what fans said over Twitter.”

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SWERY and his producer, Tomio, started by making a list of improvements that could be made over the original, after collating all that feedback, then decided what could realistically be achieved from that list. “That included game control and difficulty – there’s only one difficulty you can set for this Director’s Cut,” he says. “We also changed the mapping, and the loading times are much improved now.”

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After making the same game twice, especially when it took almost five years the first time, you might think that he’d be sick of it by now.

Given that we Deadly Premonition apologists suffered through all of these technical issues the first time around and stoically denied them the satisfaction of ruining the game for us, it’s the new story tidbits that are of most interest. The game now begins with a new sequence that sounds an awful lot like it might be an old York telling the story of Greenvale to a small child. New smatterings of story detail are intended to reward second-time players, SWERY says, but will also help newcomers get into the game quicker.

Downloadable content is another addition: it’s all cosmetic, but you can buy York a house in Greenvale now, or a new car, or change his suit. Some of this extra stuff will be available as pre-order bonuses, but it’ll all be packaged together and sold post-launch.

After making the same game twice, especially when it took almost five years the first time, you might think that he’d be sick of it by now. It’s true that SWERY seems to have his eyes towards the future, and his next game. “It might be Deadly Premonition 2, but I’m not sure – it will certainly be Deadly Something,” he says.

If you’ve ever wondered where Deadly Premonition’s surreal suburb comes from, you’ll be interested to know that the game was originally going to be set in Canada, where SWERY had spent some time with relatives. “When [director] Tomio asked me to make an open-world mystery game, I already had the image in my head of a suburban Canadian city,” he says. “It was changed to America because America was supposed to be the main market.

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“I grew up in Osaka, which is a big city, but there are still small communities within it. When I made a visit to an American suburban city, I felt a sense of nostalgia there, and that really influenced the way I make games. Through them, you might experience that nostalgia too. I felt a strange similarity to an American suburban city – that’s why I felt nostalgic when I was there.”

I think there’s an element of nostalgia to Deadly Premonition’s cult popularity, too. Back in the PlayStation 2 era, consoles were flooded with weird, experimental games like this one. But the current console generation’s development costs have been too high for smaller developers to deal with, and the recession has seen a lot of them go out of business. In Japan especially, this kind of game just doesn’t get made any more.

If SWERY has his way, though, he’ll be bucking that trend with a new game. He’s enamoured with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ modern-day Sherlock at the moment, and it’s tempting him towards a more European setting – though he’d have to choose somewhere weird, obviously like Hitchin (this is a serious suggestion).

SWERY is a lucky man to be able to reshape his game – but after around seven years in the company of Deadly Premonition, he’s ready to move on. “There is unfinished business, but once you start thinking about it you’ll never see the end of it,” he laughs. “So instead, I want to spend that time creating something new.”

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.